I've been hand-rolling my Neovim config for years. Last month I tried LazyVim. Here's what I actually think - not as a beginner, but as someone who already knows what they're doing.
For someone who just wants a sane editor, I don’t need not care for seeing up my own config or keeping up to date with neovim plugins. Like you mention vim.pack, but why should I add a user need to keep up with which plugins has the latest congenital features?
The advantage of a distro is that somebody else sets up sane defaults, keeps plugins up to date and uses the latest cool plugins. All without me needing to spend any time reading documentation and trying to set up a new plugin. And it still allows me full customization, where it’s easy to add or disable plugins.
Essentially all a distro does is move the starting point from a very basic text editor to a fairly advanced text editor. So to me it feels like a no brainier to use as my base, because somebody with 10x my experience with vim will be better at designing a work flow with vim than I will.
Not necessarily untrue, but you end up both with baggage you don’t need and worse yet, not understanding how you got what you do have.
Neovim all by itself is a very capable editor with no plugins at all. The reason you should know plugins is irrelevant, in my view. You should not need to know any, unless you want to do. And then the reason is just because you want it.
To each of their own needs of course. I don’t begrudge anybody their use of distros; I just don’t see them as optimal.
For someone who just wants a sane editor, I don’t need not care for seeing up my own config or keeping up to date with neovim plugins. Like you mention vim.pack, but why should I add a user need to keep up with which plugins has the latest congenital features?
The advantage of a distro is that somebody else sets up sane defaults, keeps plugins up to date and uses the latest cool plugins. All without me needing to spend any time reading documentation and trying to set up a new plugin. And it still allows me full customization, where it’s easy to add or disable plugins.
Essentially all a distro does is move the starting point from a very basic text editor to a fairly advanced text editor. So to me it feels like a no brainier to use as my base, because somebody with 10x my experience with vim will be better at designing a work flow with vim than I will.
Not necessarily untrue, but you end up both with baggage you don’t need and worse yet, not understanding how you got what you do have.
Neovim all by itself is a very capable editor with no plugins at all. The reason you should know plugins is irrelevant, in my view. You should not need to know any, unless you want to do. And then the reason is just because you want it.
To each of their own needs of course. I don’t begrudge anybody their use of distros; I just don’t see them as optimal.